Feeling overwhelmed by too much news? If you need to know what's important for the developer, you can rely on I Programmer to sift through all the news, uncover the most relevant stories and deliver the highlights each week.

The DEVintersection conference covering the intersection of tools, technologies, platforms and solutions will run in Europe for the first time this year, with coverage of technologies including ASP.NET 5, Visual Studio 2015, AngularJS, Azure, and IoT.

If you are a Microsoft programmer the wait for the tools needed to easily create UWAs (Universal Windows 10 Apps) is almost over. Although lower key, the SDK and Tools were launched along with Windows 10.

Buddy is a social robot that is poised to become a valued family member in many home across the globe. Developers are being encouraged to get involved by purchasing the special edition that includes the SDK.

AI and robotics have been making headline-grabbing progress recently and high profile people have started to worry in public about the future. Now we have over 1000 signatures on a letter urging a ban on autonomous weapons.

As the world argues over SDKs and copyright, Google has decided to make clear that its APIs are for it to control. If you have discovered how to use the Autocomplete API then it is time to find another way to do the same job. Google is going to stop you using the unpublished API on August 10th.

A conference organized jointly by Sharepoint Connect and IT Unity will take place 12-14 October at the Meervaart Theatre. The Early Bird offer expires on July 31st so book now to save €100 off your registration and be entered in a draw to win a Surface Pro 4.

If you studied AI, psychology or neuroscience the names Hubel and Wiesel will be part of your background. They discovered the way neurons act as feature detectors and provided the backdrop for our first understanding of the way the brain works.

Featured Articles

Android graphics is a huge subject, but you have to start somewhere. In this chapter we look a simple 2D bitmap graphics, which is often all you need, and find out what the basic principles of Android graphics are.

Unhandled Exception! Ozymandias

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The question, sorry cartoon, for this week is to work out if this really is recursion or is it simple iteration? If you find this too easy what about the hover over text? Extra credit for explaining Ozymandias and the connection to the first programmer and the first monster. Join in the debate here.

More cartoon fun at xkcd a webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language

Book Watch

Docker is quickly changing the way that organizations are deploying software at scale. But understanding how Linux containers fit into your workflow—and getting the integration details right—are not trivial tasks. Two Lead Site Reliability Engineers at New Relic, Karl Matthias and Sean P. Kane share what they have learned from using Docker in production to help you reap the benefits of this technology while avoiding the many setbacks they experienced. With their practical help, you’ll learn how to use Docker to package your applications with all of their dependencies, and then test, ship, scale, and support your containers in production.

Written by core members of the Groovy language team, this book presents Groovy from the inside out. It provides relevant examples, careful explanations of Groovy's key concepts and features, and insightful coverage of how to use Groovy in-production tasks, including building new applications, integration with existing code, and DSL development. This thoroughly revised second edition has been updated for Groovy 2.4.

DevOps promises to accelerate the release of new software features and improve monitoring of systems in production, but its crucial implications for software architects and architecture are often ignored. Here three leading architects address these issues head-on and review the decisions software architects must make in order to achieve DevOps’ goals. They also provide the organizational, technical, and operational context needed to deploy DevOps more efficiently, and review DevOps’ impact on each development phase.

As more corporations turn to Hadoop to store and process their most valuable data, the risk of a potential breach of those systems increases exponentially. Authors Ben Spivey and Joey Echeverria provide in-depth information about the security features available in Hadoop, and organize them according to common computer security concepts. With real-world examples thet demonstrate how to protect Hadoop data from unauthorized access and also show how to limit the ability of an attacker to corrupt or modify data in the event of a security breach.

Introduction to Game Development Using Processing (Mercury)Thursday 23 Jul

Processing is a free, graphics-oriented language that provides the basic functionality needed for building games. It runs on all major platforms and allows games to be built for desktop computers, HTML 5, and Android. J. R. Parker guides you through the basic game development process, covering game development topics including graphics, sound, artificial intelligence, animation, game engines, Web-based games, etc. The companion DVD contains example code, games, and color figures.

Part of the ServiceTechnolgy Series from Thomas Erl this book presents a catalog of design patterns for modern cloud-based architecture and solution design. More than two years in development, its 100+ patterns illustrate proven solutions to common cloud challenges and requirements and are supported by rich, visual documentation, including 300+ diagrams.

With the subtitle "Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise", scalability consultants Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher cover everything you need to know to smoothly scale products and services for any requirement. This extensively revised edition reflects new technologies, strategies, and lessons, as well as new case studies.

More physicists today are taking on the role of software developer as part of their research. This practical book teaches essential software development skills to help you automate and accomplish nearly any aspect of research in a physics-based field. Written by two PhDs in nuclear engineering, this book includes practical examples drawn from a working knowledge of physics concepts. You’ll learn how to use the Python programming language to perform everything from collecting and analyzing data to building software and publishing your results.